Browse Items (254 total)

"The first church in western Howard County was Saint Patrick Church at Cecelia built in 1860 on a plot given by James Roche. Made of logs, it measured 16 by 21 feet and stood in the present cemetery. For some years before, Mass had been celebrated in…

“The first resident priest in Tama was Father Charles McCabe, arriving in 1873. He stopped there on a missionary journey and decided Tama was a better location for a church because of the larger community of Catholics and the railroad, which helped…

“Father Clement Lowery was assigned to northern Iowa and southern Minnesota in 1863. While he lived with James and Mary McDevitt in Waukon, he celebrated Mass in their home until 1864. During that year he purchased four lots and a house from the…

“Settlement of Winthrop and the surrounding area began with the coming of the Illinois Central Railroad in 1868. Most Catholic immigrants were Irish. Some came as laborers on the railroad, staying to make a permanent home. Others came to farm the…

“Newhall’s Saint Paul Parish began with Father Alfred P. Meyer’s letter to Archbishop James J. Keane asking permission to start a parish. There had been two parishes in the neighboring town of Norway. One of them began as a Czech parish, with the…

“Once the Archbishop appointed a pastor for the Blessing parish, the blessing pastors occasionally visited the Catholics of the Traer area and celebrated Mass in their homes. In 1912 Father Sampson, pastor of Blessing, directed the building of Saint…

“German Catholic settlers moved into western Dubuque County in the 1860s and some made their homes in the town of Worthington. Many went to Dyersville for Mass and the sacraments, and fewer went to Saint Martin’s in Cascade, where instructions were…

"Bishop Clement Smyth directed Father Richard Nagle to acquire land within the town of Clermont, and a frame church was dedicated by the bishop in the fall of 1860. It was named for the patron saint of Peter Cummings who donated the land. Father John…

"While Father Patrick Feeley of Charles City visited the Mitchell County pioneers in the 1870s, the New Haven area Catholics decided to build a church that would unite the Irish to the north and the Germans to the south and west. In the spring of…

"Saint Peter’s in Sabula is another of those parishes than can point the 1840s for its beginning. The Catholic Almanac of 1842 lists the river town about forty miles south of Dubuque as Charleston and as a “station,” that, as a place where Mass was…